'Breaking Bad,' the final season: 'Did you really think I'd do you wrong?'

I’ll just get my immediate, Sunday night, 10:01 p.m. reaction out of the way first: disappointment. For those who didn’t experience that, I’m jealous. It causes me no pleasure to report that when the credits rolled, I turned to the friend I’d been watching with and shrugged.

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The next morning I rewatched and already liked it better. Once the pressure of surprise had lifted, I felt more able to enjoy the smaller moments. Here’s one I had missed: When Marie calls Skyler, the first thing she says is “Truce.” I loved that. That little word shone with such hope. Whatever they were fighting about, it couldn’t have been about Hank or Walt or else Marie wouldn’t have used that word. A truce declared about something small meant they had potentially begun to heal from the stuff that was big. Quarrelling is a sign of normalcy, however slight, returning. It’s what these sisters used to do, before all the light drained away.

In the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for a show to end. I haven’t been alone in this. The nation is in mourning. Yesterday I received an email from West Elm promoting its wall-mounted-TV-installation service that began with, “We’re sad that Breaking Bad is gone too.”

There is another TV-show finale that, I think we can all agree, invites comparison to "Breaking Bad": "The Wonder Years." I watched this show all the time when I was a kid and now remember almost nothing about it other than that Fred Savage became a director, the older brother had a minor role in Back to the Future and there were articles written about Winnie that called her a math genius in real life, which probably just meant that she majored in math in college. There is this one detail, though, that I’ve never forgotten from the last episode. Fred Savage’s character’s voiceover comes on and says what happened to everyone in the following years. The kids grew up and got jobs and married and all that and the mom does something new too, like take her driving test. And in between all that, he slips in, “Oh and dad? He had a heart attack a year later and died.” This sent me into hysterics. I felt blindsided and also mad. It was the tossed off part that made it feel so unfair. He wasn’t killed off because of plot reasons or a salary dispute. His was a death by one sad sentence being said among a bunch of happy sentences. If I had turned the TV off even one minute earlier, nothing about the show would have changed. I wouldn’t have been given any more time with him. He would have simply, like the others, remained alive in my mind instead of dead.

My point is, show endings—maybe all endings—carry a weight disproportionate to what came before. They become facts, something you live with. And so the real triumph of "Breaking Bad" was that even while it tied up all its loose ends, it still left us so many options about how to remember it.

The main problem that I initially had was that the finale made Walt’s redemption too clear-cut. We were unequivocally on his side. For most of the show, this had been more of a conflict. After Walt blew up Gus, we didn’t just suddenly love him again. The show has always been about the delicate balance of wanting a very bad person to get away with it. More than Walt, I mourned the death of Heisenberg.

As much as "Breaking Bad" is a series of chain reactions, it’s also a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story. Each decision the characters made set them down specific paths. But there are choices we as viewers were given too. How much sympathy we afforded Walt. How vigilant we were about remembering the whole spread of his crimes. How sucked in we allowed ourselves to be at the expense of our slowly disintegrating value systems. Now we’ve got the option of choosing our own ending. These last eight episodes are listed as part of Season 5 but known, as a group, as the Final Season. If the finale felt like a happy ending, there’s more than enough to support that. The show gave us something that seemed so impossible we didn’t even know to hope for it: that there would be a way for Walt to both lose and win. If you want to concentrate on the darkness of the three episodes that came before as well as all the time that comes next where Holly grows up without having known her dad and Jesse is never able to sleep, love, trust, date, eat ice cream or breed you can do that too.

While I watched, the episode zipped by. It had to rush to hit so many marks. Every time I looked at how many minutes were left, it was fewer than I was expecting. That magic trick of stopping time that the show does was suddenly gone. But now the episode feels slower, richer. It’s like a model ship that slides in flat so it can expand once inside the bottle. It’s feeling less about dotting all the i’s and more about securing the foundation. I like thinking about it, folding all the new information into what I already knew.

The clever resolutions surprised but it was the ones that played out just as expected that caught me more off guard.

After a few scenes of my eyes adjusting to the new rules, understanding that what seemed like empty rooms were in fact furnished with Walter White, I thought I had the game figured out: the answer is right in front of me. Didn’t make me any less shocked, though, when the answer to the biggest question turned out to be as straightforward as a kid’s first knock knock joke. How will Walt die? He will get shot and fall to the ground.

Nazis as the show’s final bad guys is both the smartest, most hilarious idea and the biggest cheat. The cheapest way to win an argument is by evoking Hitler. They gave us a fixed comparison point, with them on the farthest end of the badness scale and baby Holly on the farthest end of the good. They made it easy to forget Walt was a monster while in the same breath proving without a doubt that he was one: nothing less revolting than a band of murderous white supremacists could make this man look good.

Walt’s always seen things in terms of caste. He has his own scale, with himself at one end and Jesse at the other. He may have loved Jesse in his fucked-up way but, before Hank’s death, even Uncle Jack was treated with more respect. His delusions were dependent on this belief that he and Jesse were opposites. He was the upstanding family man while Jesse was the degenerate junkie loser. He’d broken bad while Jesse had been born to it. Jesse’s friends were garbage. Jane and Brock were expendable. Being deemed worthy of love by a nothing like Jesse cancelled out their right to live. And yet when Jesse sort of, kind of caused the death of someone Walt loved (by leading him to Walt who then directly set it in motion) Walt called on hell itself to open up and swallow him.

Like Mike, Jesse believed in vetting his cohort, his warm heart instinctively guiding him toward a crew that was, while not always the sharpest, extremely trustworthy. And in the end, when it mattered the most, it was Jesse’s people that Walt put his faith in. The last familiar face Walt saw before disappearing was Saul. The first ones he saw when returning home were Badger’s and Skinny Pete’s.

The difference in Walt’s interaction with these men is that he no longer thinks he’s above them. What’s more, he doesn’t want to be. “I liked it,” he admits to Skyler about his criminal life, “I was good at it.” But remember, even before we met him, Walt was making the choices that led to the birth of Heisenberg. He was good at being a legitimate chemist too but he rejected that.

Gretchen and Eliot weren’t on the show much but their history with Walt was such an important factor in Walt’s evolution that it could’ve had its own name in the credits. One of the last threads left hanging was exactly why Walt left Gray Matter. I read somewhere that Vince Gilligan imagined Gretchen coming from a rich, intellectual family that he felt inadequate around. He didn’t have to worry about feeling not as smart as Hank or Marie (but then the competition became about masculinity). Even without that explanation, though, the lack of a concrete answer doesn’t bother me. The resentment emanating from Walt during that lunch with Gretchen in the first season told me everything I needed to know. It wasn’t the cancer that made Walt this way; that was only the spark. He had always been a petty, narcissistic man, terrifying and terrified in equal parts. He’d thrown away the chance to be rich, prestigious and mentally stimulated all because of his pride.

After this episode, though, I think it was because of something else too: a distaste for the trappings of wealth.

Walt left one secluded bubble and entered another. Gretchen and Elliot’s new home is even farther from the city center than their last and their mindset has adjusted accordingly. Their arguments revolve around which exclusive dining experience they preferred in New York, Per Se or the 21 Club. “Are you the man I married?” asks Gretchen. They can’t believe the housekeeper hasn't stocked their kitchen with gourmet sun-dried tomatoes while they were away. It’s been two whole years since they spent Thanksgiving in Napa. As Walt grows more invisible to the world every minute, their perspective about the lives of others shrinks.

On the "Breaking Bad" podcast, Vince Gilligan and show writer Peter Gould talk about the episode where Walt and Jesse first start using the pest control business as their new front. The show had trouble finding the right house to use because it had to be big enough to accommodate the kind of shots they needed to get but not so big that it looked too nice. They wanted to really hammer home how rotten (but funny) it was for Walt to turn an unsuspecting family’s home into a meth lab and there was just something less terrible about the idea of Walt taking advantage of people who were rich. That’s the feeling I got when I watched him threaten Gretchen and Elliot. Sure it was kind of shady, you know, morality-wise, but it was such a pleasure to watch.

The line is Mr. Chips to Scarface but, in the case of Gretchen and Elliot, wasn’t it more Mr. Chips to Robin Hood? Walt didn’t steal from the rich, that he made sure of, but he certainly used them as an instrument to help the less fortunate. In the final reckoning, Walt was on a singular mission to take out the bad guys and that list included Gretchen and Elliot. He asks his two old friends, two people whose reputations are held in such high regard that they were invited onto TV to make proclamations about his own lowly character, if he can trust them.

They say yes, of course, but he knows they’re lying. So with a flick of his wrist, he signals to the small-time criminals in the bushes that he can actually trust. When they all shake on it to seal the deal, Elliot and Gretchen can barely handle the feel of his touch; it's the way Walt felt when he had to shake hands with Uncle Jack. Since they are two of the only people in the country who haven’t been watching "Breaking Bad," Walt is no better to them than a Nazi.

None of this bothers Walt. Gray Matter was his motivation for becoming Heisenberg and, in the short while he spent in that house, he accomplished all his alter ago had ever hoped for. His name had become so powerful, so known, that he didn’t even have to produce a weapon to make them bow to his will. He showed that he too knew how to become rich, like them, but he is willing to take his charity one step further. Everything he had he was giving away. He again, and for all of time, refused to accept their money. He offered up so much proof that he could provide for his own family that it could barely all fit on the table. He got in a dig about Prague. And he showed Elliot he was not only just as smart but much, much more tough.

Even after the gambling story was concocted and it was revealed to the family that he had money now, Walt still hardly ever bought anything. A few cars. A replenishing of the underwear drawer. Maybe a couple new pairs of Wallabees. His look changed when he was Heisenberg but as Walt, his basic style stayed the same. It wasn’t for a lack of culture or refinement. It’s that his main interest was in ideas, which come free.

Teach a man how to fish and he will never go hungry. Teach a man the laws of engineering and physics and he will be able to build most anything out of another thing. It was the craftiness that caused him satisfaction, the lack of waste. Walt’s best ideas come when he is under the wire, with limited resources and a finite, urgently-ticking-down clock. All those sprawling months in the cabin made his mind go blank. It was only once he set a very literal deadline that every step to get there became clear.

But as smart as Walt was, it was not just the cerebral high that he was after. That is the difference between him and Elliot. In fact, much more than Elliot, it was Hank who bore the closest resemblance to the man Walt wanted to be. He didn’t want to be the guy who quaked while waving a cheese knife. He wanted to be the guy who looked a Nazi in the eye and used his last breath to tell him to pull the trigger. And if he could manage to combine that level of guts with the impressive mind that he already had, so much the better.

“Cheer up, beautiful people,” says Walt. “This is where you get to make it right.” Once finished with his old flame, it’s onto his real true love. The queen was captured but is now free. The king remains standing but cornered on the other side of the board. Once again in her kitchen with her husband on his birthday, Skyler listens as he tells her everything he did was for himself. It made him feel alive. She looks down at her hand and quietly sobs. She’s so frail now. Vince Gilligan dressed her in clothes that were a little too big. She stares up at her husband again and now her expression is soft. You can see how she must have looked at him when she and Walt first met. A sweet, young waitress who adored a brilliant man.

The scene between Skyler and Walt affected me the most and that seems to be a popular (if unofficial) consensus. Which is really such a victory. For most of the run of the show, Skyler was a character that viewers, I think unfairly, struggled to care about. The idea of Walt losing his family was painful but more abstract. The sympathy didn’t feel directed specifically toward Skyler and Jr. (or obviously Holly). It was more like, “Yes, that would suck if that happened.” In this last handful of episodes, the show seemed to be working on fixing this, on making it right. Like I’ve said before, I always enjoyed Marie but after Hank died, I felt a degree of tenderness toward her that even I hadn’t been expecting.

A friend sent me a text the next day about how he couldn’t stop thinking about Marie packing up Hank’s minerals. "She'll probably keep a couple of the real nice ones for memories but no way can she keep them all, there's just too many. So she'll have to go through them and choose and she'll be alone when she's doing it."

Walt doesn’t tell Skyler about the plan he arranged with Gretchen and Elliot. I’m sure he thought hiding it from her was a selfless act. He loves her, I believe that. His wedding band is the stamp of identity that he chooses to take to his grave, in lieu of the watch from Jesse that symbolized the triumph of the Heisenberg legacy. The sight of that basement apartment must have shattered his heart. Instead of with him as they grow old together, his wife shares her bedroom with their daughter. This probably has a lot to do with that encounter with Todd but still, their new home has a lot less room. When he reaches into his wallet, though, she reiterates that she didn’t want his money. She’d rather live humbly than dishonestly. This is her penance for having strayed so far from being the woman who was appalled at her sister’s shoplifting. Walt knows this but instead of honoring the convictions that she has finally found her way back to, he chooses to trick her into profiting from their crimes.

Meanwhile, Jr., the nicest teenager in the world, will soon become a trust-fund kid which I’m not sure means he’ll turn out better than being the son of a drug kingpin.

In Great Expectations, Magwitch the convict anonymously leaves the little orphan, Pip, a large inheritance; but Pip thinks it’s from the haughty, insulated Miss Havisham. Trying to learn the ways of high society, he ingratiates himself to the rich folks while shunning the poor ones he’d known all his life. Walt tried so hard to keep Elliot and Gretchen away from his family but now, out of love but also, as always, out of pride, he has guaranteed their influence over his children’s upbringing. Walt would surely have been happier with Hank as Jr.’s surrogate father than Elliot.

I am still let down by the final handling of Jesse. Until this season, I had imagined it all coming down to a showdown between these two. Vince Gilligan has said the ending changed many times and I’m sure there were versions where this happened. And it did happen in this version too, only in such an abbreviated way. I keep imagining the writer’s room board and an index card that just says “JANE” on it getting moved back and forth, up and down. Walt in the desert telling Jesse what happened was such a champagne-cork-pop of a surprise for Jesse and us viewers both. We always knew it would happen but it still felt so sudden when it did. Because of all that build-up, I needed a little more, though, even just one more conversation or scene. Until the last second when he did, I was convinced that Walt wouldn’t save Jesse. The Jane revelation to me meant the opposite, that he would kill him as many ways as he could. He did save him, though, and that’s where the cabin in the woods conceit, besides being so dark, was also quite deft. With all that time trapped with just his thoughts, Walter White could’ve achieved clarity about anything.

We’ll never know when Walt decided to save Jesse. Was it only when he saw him in chains that Walt understood that it wasn’t just his family who deserved things made right? Or was it earlier, as far back as in the bar? Was Charlie Rose as inadvertently responsible for Jesse’s life as Walt was for the deaths of all those plane crash victims? Was it during the drive from New Hampshire to New Mexico? Was it in the car with Badger and Skinny Pete? After confirming the continued manufacturing of the blue meth, he doesn’t seem thrilled to hear that Jesse’s product has surpassed his. A flicker of Heisenberg passes across his face, like a flashlight’s faint glow as its batteries give out. Or maybe what we’re seeing is pride, only a different kind than we’re used to from Walt: the pride that comes from actual accomplishment. When he tells Skyler that he was good at the meth business, what he means is he had below average interpersonal managerial skills that he made up for by being the most ruthless and that he was a great cook. Maybe what he is reminded of in the car is that he was also a great teacher. He had taught an underachieving junkie how to be an incredibly competent chemical manufacturer.

Walt was the most honest he’s ever been in this episode. When Gretchen asks why he doesn’t just give Jr. money, he answers, “I can’t. My wife and son hate me.” At the same time, the lies he tells have the least of the truth in them. He tells Lydia and Todd that he’s desperate, that’s he’s spent all his money to protect himself. They fall for it because Lydia, as regimented as she is, has always been impulsive when it comes to killing people who she thinks could bring her harm.

The most obvious clue to how things would end was given to us in the very first episode: this is a show about a dead man. That, in turn, led to a riddle. What is something that makes you die but doesn’t kill you? Answer: Walter White’s cancer.

Whether it came or went, we always knew it wouldn’t be what actually took him down. He made that clear all along, during Skyler’s intervention when he talks about dying on his own terms or during the speech he gave Jr. about not wanting to end up sick in a hospital like his dad, too delirious to recognize his own son.

Walt’s cancer is what undermines his sacrifices. He could never have given his own life to save Jesse’s because he was dying anyway. An argument could be made that Walt asked Jesse to shoot him as a gift to Jesse. He could feel the bullet in his gut doing its damage and wanted to give Jesse the chance to have his revenge before it was finished.

But I think asking Jesse to shoot him was not all that different from Lydia telling Todd they would be doing Walt a favor. Walt was more interested in helping himself than the other way around.

“Do it yourself,” says Jesse, but in true mass-murderer fashion, Walt has rarely been the one who pulls the trigger. He had Salamanca kill Gus, Jesse kill Gayle and, inadvertently, Uncle Jack kill Hank. Walt even managed to kill himself with a bullet that he didn’t fire. By shooting him, Jesse would actually have been doing Walt a favor while Walt would have just burdened him with one last ghost. Manipulating his protégé until the bitter end. Happy days are here again.